What I didn’t mention was that these dials were painted by hand and the vast majority of those hands belonged to young women working for one of the companies making these dials. I mentioned earlier that radium was used to paint glow-in-the-dark dials for watches, aircraft instruments, compasses, and so forth. So they had radium condoms, radium cigarettes, radioactive toothpaste, radium show polish – not radioactive, but using that word “radium” to connote high quality.” “The word radium meant ‘quality.’ It’s the equivalent today of ‘gold’ or ‘platinum.’ I have a platinum credit card back then you’d have had a radium credit card. In the BBC documentary Nuclear Nightmares (which was about radiation phobia) health physicist Paul Frame commented on this:
What’s interesting is that companies started using “radium” in product names, even when the product contained nary a trace of the element. Radium let people see things in the dark, and the public loved it as much as the soldiers, fliers, and sailors. And a few years before that I’d responded with the NYPD to a storage area that held a collection of antique military compasses – also with radium-painted numbers and hashmarks. It had electric lights for standard illumination and radium for low-intensity illumination.Ī few years ago, I was asked to survey a sextant that had radium-based paint – it didn’t give off high radiation levels, but they were clearly higher than background. These bubble sextants were used by large planes (Mostly Bombers) during WWII to navigate by the stars (over the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans) where the natural horizon was not visible and replaced by the bubble. Some of these products were made for the military self-luminous dials for airplane instruments, self-luminous nautical navigational instruments, glow-in-the-dark patches soldiers put on their shoulders to help the person behind them follow more easily (these were great to put next to doors, light switches, and the like at home as well), and compasses that could be read in the dark were among the most common.īausch and Lomb AN5854-1 Aircraft Bubble Sextant. Between the paint and the plastic, virtually anything could be made to glow in the dark. Not only that, but mixing zinc sulfide and radium into plastic created a plastic that glowed in the dark. In industry, for example, radium was quickly found to cause a suspension of zinc sulfide to emit light mixing radium into such a suspension produced a paint that glowed in the dark.
#Radium glow in the dark how to
By the end of the first decade of the 20th-century people knew how to work safely with radium and they were beginning to tease out some uses for this novel material.
#Radium glow in the dark skin
Within a few years of its discovery radium’s ability to cause skin burns had been noted, along with appropriate protective measures. And when the world heard about this petite Polish woman, laboring in obscurity in a makeshift laboratory in Paris, who had discovered not one, but two new elements (radium and polonium) – both of them radioactive, at a time when radioactivity itself was novel and exciting the world was enchanted with Madame Curie, her story, and the radium she had discovered. Marie Curie was perhaps the first “rock star” scientist – she was smart, hard-working, attractive, had survived tragedy, and made history as the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in an era in which women’s role in science was more likely to be that of cleaning up the lab than organizing it.
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